I'm sure many of us have been frustrated, if not annoyed, by the fact that Picasa Web Album only provides 1GB of free storage. Although Google says it is more than sufficient to hold up to 4,000 wallpaper size photos, to many, that simply isn't enough.

Here are five reasons, to begin with, why Google should give us more free storage:

#1 Given Google's ambition to hold more digital data online and to make it *universally* accessible, more free storage definitely means larger capabilities to share, by anyone.

#2 Gmail offered 1GB of storage when it was first launched, up to 100 times that offered by other webmail competitors. Till now, not only do we have more than 7300MB (and increasing daily) of storage, but it also revolutionised the webmail world by forcing its competitors to increase their free storage. Why can't Picasa lead the revolution among online albums?

#3 Picasa Web Album is becoming the hub to store images hosted on other Google product that belongs to the same user. For instance, Blogger photos will be automatically stored in Picasa, whether you like it or not. Thus, a 1GB free storage cap. restricts the capacity of other Google products.

#4 Google has emphasised the benefits of hosting data in the cloud, i.e. on web servers instead of our own PCs. Google Docs is a good example of sticking to this vision. Why isn't Picasa Web Album aligned to this goal?

#5 Many open several Gmail accounts just to upload all the photos they want to. This would be detriment to Google's attempts to make Picasa Web Album more "socialable". Having multiple profiles means it is more unlikely for one to use the social features as it would be hard to keep up with all the activities in one unified location.

So if you want more free storage, please show your support by replying to this thread. Or if you have come up with better reasons (which I'm sure there are) why Google should give us more storage, feel free to reply as well.

The day to revolutionise online albums has come. It is now!

Did you know you can buy more storage for Picasa web albums?

Quote http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=39567

   * 10GB – $20/yr
   * 40GB – $75/yr
   * 150GB – $250/yr
   * 400GB – $500/yr

Thanks, Philipp. I do realise there is (rather incompetitive) paid storage but I think paid storage is not attractive to normal layman users who can easily switch to other online services. If you compare it to Gmail, which offers a storage that I assume, satisfy over 80% of the users' need. The paid storage then makes sense. So I think, Picasa Web Album should increase it's free storage to a level where majority of users can comfortably share and store their photos with.

And I said the price is incompetitive because Flickr offers unlimited storage for just $24.95/year.

Meanwhile a Flickr Pro account provides genuinely unlimited storage and bandwidth for $25 per year.
http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28

I'd like it if your storage allocation was shared between Gmail and Picasa Web, not just the extra but ALL of your storage. I'd use PWA a lot more if they did.

Yes, agreed.

Yes I agree with Mrrix32... If they shared my 7GB Gmail storage with my Picasa Web account, I would use Picasa more.

I realize they share your storage space if you pay for more storage, but it would be nice if they did this even if you don't buy additional storage.

Roger http://blogoscoped.com/forum/157474.html#id157477

Tha's exactly what i was going to mention.

Also, i with Picasa would adopt more features to compete with Deviant Art. The deviantart community is awesome, but their website sucks. I hope Picasa can become useful for deviantart users

Mrrix32 The 7GB of GMail storage is much cheaper for Google than Picasa Web as they it likely occupies only a fraction of that disk space.

Emails, which are mostly textual, can be compressed and duplicates of an email sent to many GMail accounts, only actually needs to be stored once.

Motti I guess street view images alone adding up costs Google even more, but there are freely available. So I don't see how the logic flows.

DPic, I agree, a DeviantART-like community would be great in PicasaWeb, and while Picasa's website is better than DeviatART, I wish it had some of the features that Deviant does which it does not.

Does anyone here actually subscribe to Flickr Pro instead of upgrading storage in Picasa Web Album?

Yes Keith I have a Flickr Pro account and use that over Picasa Web Albums. I have 11,000+ photos on there which I would guess is around 20 GB of stuff, maybe a bit more.

I've had the account for maybe 4 years now (I certainly had it before Picasa Web Albums existed) and I much prefer the interface, the tools available and the community.

Dugg.

Seems this thread is not getting the momentum I thought it would have. Anyway, Sam proves that Picasa really isn't competitive in the photo sharing field.

1GB is too restricted. If it able to share the 7GB mail storage to picasa web, this will be wonderful.

If Picasa can offer a considerable huge amount of diskspace and unlimited bandwidth (maybe compulsory linkback to Picasa like Flickr), it will sure shake Flickr a bit.

The storage Picasa is selling makes no sense. We have much better community on Flickr, and a pro account is like just $25, and you can upload as much as you want!

Even if you are not playing for Flickr, it still wins in a long run. Say you upload less than 100mb per month, you can just keep uploading without worrying. For Picasa, once you have reach 1GB diskspace, you are gone forever unless you delete.

Why not create a http://twitition.com ?